


spectrum

by KestralWatcher



Series: saving space [5]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Character of Color, Asexuality, Background immortal husbands, Canon Compliant, Multi, Slice of Life, all the immortals are queer AF, queer is a spectrum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:27:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25922815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KestralWatcher/pseuds/KestralWatcher
Summary: They generally stick to English for these conversations, though Nile’s Italian gets better every day. She giggles at Joe’s attempt at a double entendre. “You think he was flirting with me?”Joe mimes comical surprise at her question. “You did not realize? And here, Nicky and I thought we were teaching you proper romance by osmosis.”“Oh, I can appreciate the art of flirting,” Nile says. “I just don’t always notice when I’m the target, because never in a million years would it occur to me to flirt back.”Nile reveals a truth about herself to her new family. They respond in typically over-dramatic fashion.
Series: saving space [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1870753
Comments: 46
Kudos: 459





	spectrum

**Author's Note:**

> Queerness is a spectrum, and asexuality on that spectrum contains its own multitudes. This is my interpretation of Nile and is not meant to be a definitive example of representation. 
> 
> Many thanks to Wind_Ryder for the beta.

They have a tradition now. After knife-practice mornings, after they have sliced each other to ribbons as Joe had gleefully promised, they hit town for lunch, just the two of them. Though Nile always comes out of training the worse for wear, Joe does not escape their sessions unscathed lately. He insists on a change of location to deconstruct the training sessions, to put time and a shower and a chance for them to come down from the adrenaline high to discuss how it’s going. And if it sometimes veers into a discussion on how Nile is handling the whole immortality situation she has found herself thrust in, she doesn’t mind the gentle check-in.

Today, they share post-lunch gelato under the Italian summer sun. The novelty of Nile’s double scoop of _stracciatella_ and chocolate has not yet worn off, even when the scoops are so large that she has to lick drips from the side of her overloaded cup.

Joe watches her, and when he does that thing where he seems to squint out of one eye, Nile knows the next words out of his mouth will have nothing to do with knives. “I should let you go in on your own next time. See if both our orders get such special treatment.”

Nile freezes, then licks excess gelato from her lips before asking, “What are you talking about?”

Gesturing to the shop down the street from their bench, Joe says, “The man in the shop gave you extra.” He winks. “You know, you can come into town on your own anytime. Don’t always have to have a chaperone.”

She nudges him with her elbow, and he nudges her right back. “I know I don’t need a chaperone. I just like hanging out with you guys.” She stares at her cup of gelato and compares it with Joe’s, but he eats so fast it’s impossible to tell whether their servings had been significantly different.

“Ah, but there are so many types of ‘hanging out.’”

They generally stick to English for these conversations, though Nile’s Italian gets better every day. She giggles at Joe’s attempt at a double entendre. “You think he was flirting with me?”

Joe mimes comical surprise at her question. “You did not realize? And here, Nicky and I thought we were teaching you proper romance by osmosis.”

“Oh, I can appreciate the art of flirting,” Nile says. “I just don’t always notice when I’m the target, because never in a million years would it occur to me to flirt back.”

After mulling on that for another bite of gelato, Joe asks, “Never found the right person worthy of your efforts?”

“Probably won’t,” Nile says. The immediate honesty of her answer shocks her a bit. Then again, lying to her new brother about her truth at this point is as unthinkable as flirting with the gelato guy. She shrugs one shoulder. “I’m ace.”

Joe stares at her, but Nile can tell it’s an _I have no idea what you just said_ stare rather than an _I am shocked and appalled_ stare. She’s gotten plenty of the latter over the years. “Asexual,” she says. “Not interested in anyone in a sexual way.”

“Ah,” Joe says, drawing out the vowel. Now, Nile feels her insides do that weird tensing, but he continues with, “Still gonna have you order the gelato for us next time.”

* * *

Nothing is different that night, but Nile is on her own as Joe and Nicky go back to town for a dinner date, and Andy rides off to who knows where on the old motorbike that showed up at the house one day. Nile treats herself to an American-style mac and cheese dinner and passes out before the others return home.

There’s a schedule. One day with Andy on hand-to-hand combat. One with Joe and the knife-fighting. One with Nicky and whatever he decides to throw at her. And a final day to recover and do whatever the hell she wants.

But the next morning, she wakes to a note from Nicky slipped under her door. He apologizes for postponing their planned adventure with sniper rifles and encourages her to enjoy the extra day to relax. When she gets downstairs, Andy’s bedroom door is firmly shut, and the guys have already disappeared again.

Nile had been looking forward to the sniper training, but she’s still enough of a Marine to take the extra rest time when it’s on offer. A cup of hot coffee remains in the carafe, so she snags that and puts on more for Andy whenever the older woman emerges and selects a banana from the counter. Time to catch up on Netflix on the couch. Maybe she’ll go for a run later.

They keep missing each other, and by the time she’s finished her run, the guys have gotten home and Andy emerges from her lair. Nile joins the group for an early dinner and finds nothing amiss, but when she heads to the living room after her shower to join them for a movie, she halts in the entrance.

Andy sprawls in her usual chair, and Nile feels the other woman’s eyes on her like a hawk as she takes in Nicky’s position at the very end of the couch and how Joe has claimed the other plush chair that is usually Nile’s spot.

Okay, if the guys don’t want to cuddle for the movie, that’s—okay. Weird. She forces herself out of her brief pause and drops onto the opposite end of the couch. Resists the urge to make a “pod people” crack because she doesn’t want to have to explain the reference if they don’t get it.

Are they in a fight, and Nile doesn’t know it? Couples fight. Even Joe and Nicky, together for centuries, probably still fight. But she sees no tenseness in their interaction, as they trade jokes through the semi-ridiculous heist movie. Only the physical distance between them. Also weird. She focuses on the film.

* * *

Then, the next afternoon is worse. When Nile comes downstairs, looking for a change of scenery to finish her book, Joe and Nicky are curled together on the couch. It’s the usual afternoon nap routine, in which Nicky is the only one napping, body entwined in Joe’s legs with his head on Joe’s thigh while Joe uses Nicky’s shoulder as a desk for sketching.

Perhaps the weird distance, or fight, or whatever it had been, between them has passed, and Nile will never know what caused it. She drops her book on her usual chair and mimes fetching a drink. Joe shakes his head no, smiling in thanks.

But when Nile returns from the kitchen, her book rests on the couch arm. Joe is back in Nile’s chair, and Nicky has sat up on the couch, where he scrolls through his phone with sleep-squinted eyes.

“The light is better here,” Joe says, waving his pencil. “Figured you wouldn’t mind.”

“Nah, it’s cool.” And then the moment Nile settles on the couch, Nicky jumps up from his spot and mutters something about starting dinner.

Joe spends all of the dinner prep shooting glances at the kitchen, which Nile catches over the book she has given up reading. Usually, he’s in the kitchen, playing at being a sous chef as he steals kisses and bites to eat while Nicky indulges him every step of the way. The meal itself is worse. The smell summons Andy from her room, but she spends her time between bites glowering at Nicky and Joe, who keep up a stilted conversation.

Nile’s confusion has reached an all-time high. Is Andy in a fight with them now? Nile hasn’t said much over dinner either, except “please” and “thank you” and “pass the wine.” Andy herself has said nothing at all. And as much as this tiny, nontraditional family has done their best to incorporate Nile into their lives because it is also her new life, she recognizes that it will take time for her to break through the centuries’ worth of history shared by these three immortals.

The atmosphere thaws as Nile joins the debate about whether to watch the sequel to the previous night’s movie. In the middle of debating whether to watch the sequel that night, Nicky reaches for Joe’s hand. But before Nicky can bring it to his lips, Joe pulls away.

Then, the table jerks. Someone has kicked someone else, but Nile can’t tell who from her angle. Everyone freezes for two beats, three. Andy breaks first, when she heaves a dramatic sigh, grabs the half-empty wine bottle and her glass from the table, and leaves the rest of her food behind to stomp into her bedroom.

Nicky smiles at Nile, in a way that is perfectly lovely but does not quite reach his eyes. “Perhaps a rain check on the film, Nile?”

“Sure, no rush.” Nile returns to her meal, and silence descends across the table. It’s even worse than the half-conversation before.

Definitely pod people. They continue to dissect discrepancies in the film, and Nicky turns his criticism to the romance that had been shoe-horned in between the master thief and museum curator. Joe’s eyes dart toward Nile for a split second. She would miss it entirely had she not looked up from her food to reach for her water. In a smooth transition, Nicky turns to the improbability of the curator having her level of education when the actress who portrayed her appeared in her mid-twenties.

Oh.

It wasn’t a fight.

It was her.

Usually, she stays to help with clean-up, but tonight she abandons her dishes on the counter. Nicky and Joe can get their flirt back on if she’s not around, since they seemed to have developed some strange, misguided notion that anything related to love or romance or affection was not to be shown or discussed around Nile. She collapses atop her bed and stares at the ceiling, not sure why she’s surprised by the hollow feeling in her chest despite her full stomach. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before.

The girls in her unit had regular movie nights before they deployed to the sandbox. Often, she and Dizzy shared a couch, legs tangled together as they passed popcorn or candy back and forth. Dizzy never gave her the _I am shocked and appalled_ look either when Nile shared that she was ace. But after that, movie nights changed. Nothing else about their friendship, not the couch, not the snacks. Instead, Dizzy always made sure to leave space between them, always kept her legs aside. And the rom-coms in the movie rotation, a chance for even badass Marines to indulge their softer side, fell away in favor of spectacles filled with action and explosions.

And now it’s happening again, except even worse, if Nicky and Joe are afraid to touch _each other_ while Nile is around. She has barely been part of this family for a quarter of a year, a drop in the bucket compared to the life she is now expected to live, and already it is fracturing around her.

Nile curls to her side, and her eyes fall on one of the few books in English she has been borrowing from Booker’s impromptu library upstairs. A tattered military thriller from the 90s, in which she has delighted in annotating the errors. Is this how Booker felt, as he peeled away from his family on first a knife-edge and then a chasm that gaped wider and wider?

Because Nile knows this chasm will grow. The empty gap that still hovers at the edge, where Booker should be, is a continual example of how three people with many millennia combined between them can be utter and complete idiots. With this new development, spurned by Nile’s admission and whatever weird way Joe has interpreted it and then passed it on to Nicky, the team treads old, dangerous patterns.

And Nile can’t change anything about what happened with Booker, but she doesn’t deserve to have her new family fall apart so soon after she’s found it. She also doesn’t deserve to have to fix this, whatever bullshit this is, when it’s not her Goddamned fault. She pounds her fist into the bed and squeezes her eyes shut against the threatening tears.

As comfortable as she is with them, Nile has no desire to sit the team down and beat it in their skulls that her sexual orientation, which she has been comfortable with since she learned the term for it in ninth grade, has zero bearing on how Andy and Joe and Nicky ( _especially_ Joe and Nicky) interact with each other and with her. The imagined discomfort curdles her gut at the mere thought.

Except she also can’t expect Andy or Joe or Nicky to fix this either when they apparently have no earthly idea what the actual problem is. Joe had appeared nonplussed when she acknowledged her asexuality to him, so he had some knowledge of the subject. But like the rest of queerness, even being ace existed on a spectrum. Did they know someone in their long past who identified as ace, but who hated to be touched? Grew uncomfortable around external signs of physical affection, even when not directed at them? It shocks Nile not at all to know Joe and Nicky would be content to relinquish that aspect of their love around her for another thousand years if they have any impression it gave their new sister discomfort.

But she can’t leave the way things are much longer. There has to be another way.

Nile lurches off the bed and snags her laptop from where she left it atop her dresser earlier. It’s not the freaking eighteenth century, when Joe and Nicky probably had to explain their relationship to Booker. While previously, Nile might have wanted to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, now she has more sympathy for every party all around. It’s the twenty-first century, where people much brighter than Nile have already used better words to convey—nicely, politely—how stupid her new brothers are being.

It takes Nile hours to find what she wants. The house around her is silent as she sends the essay on the differences between asexuality and touch aversion to the printer downstairs. For the hell of it, she also adds a list of definitions she found. If she was going to educate her family on “modern” sexualities, she might as well do a thorough job with it and include things like aro and demi and pan to the mix.

She creeps downstairs to collect the papers. The kitchen is probably the best place to leave them for all three housemates to notice and hopefully read. Just to make herself clear, she scribbles a note in the margin of the top page:

_I’m the same person you first met. You should be, too._

After she pins the packet to the fridge with a Disney Paris magnet (wondering for perhaps the hundredth time why they _have_ a Disney Paris magnet), Nile rewards herself with a few bites of hazelnut gelato directly from the pint before heading back upstairs to bed.

* * *

Hand-to-hand with Andy is up the next morning, and Nile is exhausted. At least it adds verisimilitude to the training for when they’re forced into combat on a mission after a night without rest. She detours through the kitchen for a granola bar on her way to the veranda.

The papers are still on the fridge, but not quite where she originally placed them.

Andy has never been that physically affectionate, so the training session is a breath of the familiar after the jarring experiences of the past two days. But after the session, as Nile finishes her water bottle and mourns the loss of another exercise shirt to the blood from a shattered nose, Andy cups her hand behind Nile’s neck.

From Andy, this is the equivalent of a back-pounding embrace. Nile stills under her touch.

“They’re idiots,” Andy says. “But they’re our idiots. They’ll figure it out.”

With no further explanation, Andy vanishes into the house. Probably to steal the first shower and use up all the hot water. Nile can’t seem to find it in herself to mind.

The packet on the fridge shifts at least once more that day, but Nile mostly avoids the kitchen. The team shares a takeout dinner in the living room that evening, and the atmosphere is almost back to normal. Nile should not feel this happy about Nicky feeding Joe a piece of naan. Instead of rolling her eyes when Nile catches her gaze, Andy winks.

The others clean up after dinner, while Nile hooks her laptop up to the TV so they can watch more episodes of the _Great British Baking Show_. Once it’s set up, she turns to find Andy in her usual chair. And Nicky and Joe cuddled to one side of the couch with a bowl of popcorn.

Nile’s shoulders loosen, a tension she hadn’t even realized was there.

Then, Nicky says, “Help me keep Joe from eating all the popcorn.” He extends his free hand in invitation.

When Nile sits next to him, Nicky wraps his arm around Nile and tugs her close. She nestles into his side and tugs the popcorn bowl out of Joe’s lap. He immediately steals it back. As Nile walks Andy through getting the episode started, Nicky leaves his arm around Nile. His other hand rests on Joe’s leg.

“We should do this more often,” Nicky says, halfway through the episode’s technical challenge.

“What, watch cooking shows?” Joe asks.

“No,” Nicky says. “Share the couch like this. It’s cozy.” He squeezes Nile’s shoulder.

Paul Hollywood is in the middle of announcing that week’s technical challenge winner, but Nile pulls herself away long enough to smack a kiss to Nicky’s cheek. “It is,” she says.

Joe presses an even wetter kiss to Nicky’s neck on the opposite side, then does something with his mouth that Nile (thankfully) doesn’t catch. Nicky’s full body jerks enough to flip the popcorn bowl, and Nile ends up having to rewind ten minutes of the episode after the three have thrown enough popcorn at each other to make cleaning up the living room later a complete pain.

From her seat across the room, Andy smiles at their antics.

Booker’s silent specter will probably linger in the shadows for a long time. But for now, as much as she can be, Nile is at home with her family.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Andy definitely kicked Joe under the table because she is already tired of their stupidity.
> 
> 2\. I don't know why they have a Disney Paris magnet either.
> 
> 3\. I still haven't managed to acquire any gelato.


End file.
